The Ultimate Guide to Developing A SEO Strategy That Actually Works!

1. Define Your Target Audience & Their Interests

In order to maximize your SEO strategies effort and to ensure you are being seen by the right audience, you need to know your customers. So look into questions like what are their pain points? What goes into their buying decisions or who do they go for trusted sources of information and more? Finding answers to these customer-centric questions not only helps you create a buyer’s persona but also ensures that you put together the best  SEO strategies that drive traffic and that convert leads to sales. Keep these key elements in mind to determine your target audience:

• Your Current Visitors and Customers
• Understand Your Competitors & Their Tactics
• Identify the Potential Demographics 
• Analyze the SERPs
• Use Social Media Analytics

2. Conduct A SEO Competitive Analysis

Once you’re settled on your business goal and target audience, the next step for you is to conduct an SEO competitor analysis. It is the process of collecting and evaluating your competitor’s SEO strategies to make an informed decision. It helps you gauge what your competitors are doing and after considering market trends, you can identify how you can create better SEO strategies than your competitors and outrank them. This is how you do SEO competitor analysis:

• Identify your potential competitors
• Gain a better understanding of their ranking keywords
• Analyze competitors’ content performance
• Analyze competitors’ presence on Social Media
• Select areas for improvement and opportunities

3. Create A List Of Keywords

The choice of Keywords and content are two of the most vital components of your SEO strategies. Keywords show the search engine what your content is about, so how does it work for your SEO? Well, when a prospect types a query for something related to your business, your keywords are the tool that helps them find you online. But this works when you have done a good enough job of keyword optimization and that’s how you get prominent rankings on search engines. So optimize your keywords as they make your content and your business have a more visible presence in the search engines. So to ensure you’re using the right keywords and these points help you in optimizing your keywords:

• Your current On-page SEO
• Find Keywords For Your Site
• Use Keyword Research Tools To Dig Deeper 
• Map Your Keywords, Especially Long-Tail Keywords
• Add Keywords To Your Siteavoid Keyword Stuffing
• Don’t Forget Your Target Audience

4. Create SEO-friendly, Targeted Content

Content marketing is one of the integral parts of your SEO strategies as it propels your marketing efforts and brings a high volume of quality traffic to your website, which eventually converts visitors into leads and then sales. You should strategize and properly integrate your content in your SEO strategies if you want to grab your customers’ attention that goes beyond the search results page to your websites. So once your ads get them to your site, it is high-quality content like blogs, web copies, or product descriptions that increase your brand’s awareness, credibility and eventually revenue. So an effective way to have great strategies for SEO is to follow these key elements:

• Create & Follow a Content Calendar
• Provide Engaging, Valuable Content Regularly
• Put Together Content that’s Both Relevant to Readers and Google
• Promote Content on Social Media 
• Focus on Personalization
• Track Your Metrics and Tweak Your Strategy Accordingly

5. Choose The Right Website Design & Layout

Usually, website designs are not considered an SEO strategy tactic which is where many marketers fail to maximize their SEO strategies’ efforts. Since your website is the window to your products and services and the first point of interaction with your potential customers, you need to work towards making a great first impression. It does not matter how amazingly you implement your online marketing strategies or how powerful your SEO strategy is if your website is not designed to complement both of them. So keep these website elements to amplify your SEO strategy: 

• Intuitive Navigation/Accessibility
• Easy-to-Read Content
• Mobile Friendly Design
• Visual Elements of Website Design
• Persuasive Calls-to-action
• Keep Load Time in Mind

If the website development process seems too overwhelming for you, then you can always seek website development and web design services and guidance. 

6. Take Care Of Technical SEO Aspects

Having amazing, compelling and engaging content will help your website rank well but if it is filled with technical SEO issues then you should quit thinking about ranking high, let alone anywhere in the first 5 Google pages. So not only you need to focus on On-site SEO but also Off-site SEO, as this will help the search engine crawlers/indexers bot in finding your site easily and crawling for indexing and ranking its various web pages easily & quickly. So here’s the checklist for your SEO technical elements:

• Check and fix crawl errors 
• Switch To HTTPS
• Create an XML sitemap
• Optimize Robots.txt
• Set your preferred domain 
• Optimize website navigation
• Add structured data markup
• Check your canonical URLs
• Find and fix broken links
• Use search engine friendly URLs
• Boost website’s speed
• Make your site mobile friendly

7. Build High-Quality Backlinks

Link building process can make or break your strategies for SEO, Google search defines backlinks as “links to your website using your keywords or keyword phrases from the other website over the web that has the same theme or similar content topic as your own website”. Therefore, backlinks are not only a key part of SEO but they are very crucial to help your web in ranking high, boosting your website’s viewability and they also drive organic traffic to your web. So how do you get backlinks from a high page rank website or blog that are not a paid link? Follow these principles to build and get high-quality backlinks:

• Blog Commenting to Similar Site/Blog
• Write Relevant, Detailed and Competitive Content
• Share Links on Social Media Site
• Create an Infographic or Original Image
• Link Externally and Then Reach Out

8. Track & Trace Your SEO Progress

A data-driven, tracking approach to your strategies for SEO is the way ahead to get the maximum result out of it. This not only ensures you know what initiatives are bringing results and what not but also helps you avoid wasting your marketing budget. If you want to keep a track of your website’s search engine rankings, then you also need to track the progress of your SEO campaigns and prepare SEO reports out of it. Use various SEO progress tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, MonsterInsights, or even Social Media Insights to know your website’s performance across all search engines and improve along the way to stay relevant and ahead of everyone else.

1. Improve The Crawlability Of Your Site

The crawlers are specialized bots that browse, index, evaluate and rank new webpages on the internet, they go through link to link, URL to URL in order to bring the data to the search engine’s central servers so that it can be integrated into Google’s database. So when you improve the crawalibility of your site it means how easy you have made it for any search engine to process the content on your website without running into a broken or dead end. Simply speaking, the more complicated it is for search engines to navigate your site to determine your rank, the poorer you will rank and will be harder to find. So focus on having clear, readable, and easily accessible content on your website for readers, search engines, and their robots. 

2. Focus on Properly Categorizing Your Pages

Site structure is another element that influences your SEO strategy, so you need to pay attention to how you structure your website. A lot of sites lack a decent structure to guide visitors to the product or services they’re looking for and this leads to them exiting the site.

This is not just from a user’s perspective but if you want your content to be located by Google, you should properly categorize your pages as this “guides” Google (and Google searchers) to a specific direction when they find your content in the search engine. It’d be better if you treat your category pages like your landing pages, after all, it’s all about a user's intent, usability, and findability and this will also help your SEO strategy.

3. Utilize Social Media Platforms

Though there is no direct impact of social shares on search engine rankings, one cannot ignore the benefits of social media marketing. Social shares play a crucial role in helping you get your content in front of a larger audience all at once. So when the audience gets your content and shares it through multiple social media channels, it generates social signals or “waves,” telling that your post or content is useful to your target market and they are expanding your exposure via social shares. So utilize social media platforms especially Facebook & Instagram for maximum.

4. Leverage The Popularity Of Influencers

Just like Social Media platforms, the impact of using influencer marketing on SEO is not immediate but it is there, and it runs for the longer term. Influencer marketing is basically you partnering with an individual who is well-known and respected within his or her niche and has a strong social media footing. Influencer marketing helps your rankings by generating authoritative links, increasing user engagement, online traffic, and visibility to your brand since they have a band of fans that follow them religiously. So even if their content about your brand is sponsored, their followers will listen to them and may go for their recommendations.